is born in San Francisco, California. Disney Channel fans know her as Ashley Dewitt on

Hannah Montana and Ella Pador on Camp Rock and Camp Rock 2.

Touchstone Pictures releases the romantic comedy Green Card, starring

Gérard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell.

1887:

Comic actor Eric Blore, who voiced J. Thaddeus Toad in Disney's

1949 The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, is born in London,

England. Often cast as a snide gentleman's gentleman or dissipated nobleman, Blore was a

fixture in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals and appeared alongside such comedy greats as

Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope.

1931:

Comedian-actor Ronnie Schell is born in Richmond, California. His Disney credits include the 1981 The Devil and Max Devlin, the 1978 The Cat From Outer Space as the voice of Jake the cat, the 1977 TV special The Mouseketeers at Walt Disney World, the 1976 feature The Shaggy D.A., and even an episode of Disney Channel's Phil of the Future. (Schell will always be best remembered for playing Private Duke Slater on the series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C..)

1938:

Disney's Silly Symphony Mother Goose Goes Hollywood,

directed by Wilfred Jackson, is released. This animated short puts

Hollywood stars of the 1930's into roles from Mother Goose stories. Among the stars

are W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Laurel and Hardy as Simple Simon and the

Pieman, Katherine Hepburn as Little Bo Peep, and the Marx Brothers as Old King

Cole's fidlers three. The short will be nominated for an Academy Award.

1942:

Mouseketeer John Lee Johann is born in Madison, Wisconsin. Known simply as Lee, he was hired for ABC-TV's Mickey Mouse Club in 1955 - as a replacement for his brother Dallas.

1943:

Actor-writer Harry Shearer, the voice of Dog Announcer in the 2005 animated feature Chicken Little, is born Los Angeles, California. His Disney credits also include the 1987 TV "duckumentary" Down and out with Donald Duck. (A Saturday Night Live alumni, Shearer provides many of the voices for TV's The Simpsons and has appeared in such features as A Mighty Wind, The Truman Show, and This Is Spinal Tap.)

1954:

The Disney live-action film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (based on the

"I don’t care about critics. Critics take themselves too seriously. They think the only way to be noticed and to be the smart guy is to pick and find fault with things. It’s the public I’m making pictures for." -Walt Disney

Right after the holidays, I want to get together with you and work out a very systematic training course for young animators, and also outline a plan of approach for our older animators.

Some of our established animators at the present time are lacking in many things, and I think we should arrange a series of courses to enable these men to learn and acquire the things they lack.

Naturally the first most important thing for any animator to know is how to draw. Therefore it will be necessary that we have a good life drawing class. But you must remember Don, that while there are many men who make a good showing in the drawing class, and who, from your angle, seem good prospects - these very men lack in some other phase of the business that is very essential to their success as animators.

2012:

The Comedy Warehouse Holiday Special starts this day at Disney's Hollywood Studios. Performed 5 times daily at the Premiere Theater on the Streets of

This new experience features a look into the visionary minds behind some of the world’s most iconic animated films.

Once inside the theater, guests put on their 3D glasses and enter the imaginative worlds of three animated shorts –

"Get A Horse," "For The Birds" and "La Luna."

1919:

Robert Theodore McCall, a conceptual artist known particularly for his works of space

art, is born in Scottsdale, Arizona. Starting out as an illustrator for Life magazine in the 1960s, he later

created promotional artwork for Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This led to work for NASA (creating mission patches) as well as Disney's 1979 The Black Hole. Epcot fans may remember McCall's mural, "The

Prologue and The Promise," which was featured in the Horizons pavilion. McCall spent close to 10 months

planning and then painting the Horizons mural on a 19-by-60-foot canvas. The mural (which was completed in